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Twitter is giving the death sentence to third party clients

Started by gameblabla, May 22, 2018, 08:37:32 PM

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gameblabla

So a month ago, Twitter had announced that they are going to require devs to use the new API
for third party clients.
The problem is that it is fairly limited and also very expensive... (over 16$ a month to break even, assuming you have 250 users)

Here's a website talking about it : http://apps-of-a-feather.com/.
And corebird's dev opinion on it : https://www.patreon.com/posts/18921328

In short, Twitter is closing down its own APIs to third party clients.
In the past, twitter has repeatedly attacked third party clients, especially since most of them don't feature ads.

This also means that if you are using a non-supported platform like Linux or just recently Mac OS, you have no choice but to use their website, which is just utterly ridiculous.

I guess an alternative would be to parse the website. Youtube-dl does this to some extent.
Unfortunately, i haven't seen any graphical third-party clients (at least open source ones) that does just that.

Any tips ? Rip corebird
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Yuki

Since the new API is free for 15 users, another alternative could be that each user of your app would register it with Twitter instead of the developer fror every user, it would still work without it but you'd lose some features, but I don't know how annoying for the user it would be.

Anyway, I just use Tweetdeck and I almost never use it on my cellphone, but eh, still a bit annoying.
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Lionel Debroux

#2
For a while, I used Choqok, which is far more convenient than the standard browser-based client (I don't have a smartphone) because it makes it possible to store large - and even insanely large - amounts of contents for later reading. I gave up on most of Twitter altogether, because I was drowning in content, but I miss some aspects of the Choqok experience.
It's sad to see that they're attacking third-party clients again...

Ads aren't an issue with uBlock Origin. In general, ad blocking, besides removing often uninteresting and always distracting content, is also a must for security, as ads were shown multiple times to be an attack vector.
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gameblabla

Quote from: Juju on May 22, 2018, 08:54:06 PM
Since the new API is free for 15 users, another alternative could be that each user of your app would register it with Twitter instead of the developer fror every user, it would still work without it but you'd lose some features, but I don't know how annoying for the user it would be.
That's true, i thought about it actually. However, no one has even bothered to make a simple implementation that uses the new API. :/
(at least, not as far as i saw)
Like you pointed out, it's unknown if Twitter would make it as annoying as possible. (It was kind of a pain already with Corebird)

QuoteAds aren't an issue with uBlock Origin. In general, ad blocking, besides removing often uninteresting and always distracting content, is also a must for security, as ads were shown multiple times to be an attack vector.
I agree with you, i myself block them too. Twitter thinks otherwise on the other hand... which partly explains why they're now cracking down on them.

I tried using Netsurf with twitter with javascript disabled. However, their mobile user interface is kind of lackluster and does not display images by default until you click on the said tweet...
I can't even upload images. Surely there has to be a way.

I had considered mastodon but it seems like they are even more restrictive on adult content than even twitter.
(They remove such content out right if not tagged while twitter instead flags it as NSFW if non-compliant)
I can't even promote socialism...
In addition to that, the third party clients for Linux are terrible and not even up to date. The only one updated, is completely in japanese.
I really don't want to use a web browser just for that.
Pretty much all the Windows apps for Mastodon are using C# with WPF and (worse) UWP...
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Yuki

Quote from: gameblabla on May 22, 2018, 11:36:30 PM
I had considered mastodon but it seems like they are even more restrictive on adult content than even twitter.
(They remove such content out right if not tagged while twitter instead flags it as NSFW if non-compliant)
I can't even promote socialism...
Well, a nice thing about Mastodon is that you can run your own server if you want. Actually, it's probably recommended you go on an alternate server.

Anyway, my job at the thing I work for involves getting stats from users' social network accounts, so I'm not that concerned, but yeah, there's a risk social networks like Twitter break everything and forces us to pay a lot of money to access their API, something we can't really afford but the big companies, so I guess it's something we need to check everytime when you work with these APIs. Facebook and Instagram were quite annoying already, so I think we're going to lose it if Twitter does the same...
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Read Zarmina!
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if you wanna throw money at me and/or CodeWalrus monthly it's here

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